" Remember that time after optimizing your first website when you checked your search engine rankings and actually saw your site show up in the top of the results? Was that not the coolest feeling in the world? Part of what makes SEO so much fun is getting to tangibly see the fruits of your labor -- right there in the search results pages (SERPs). Whether you run automated ranking reports (responsibly through the search engines' APIs of course!) or just do some spot checks by hand, achieving the goals you set for your campaign totally rocks!

Before you get lost in that lovely memory, do you also remember that time soon after you spotted your high rankings when you realized that your overall traffic to your site barely went up -- and worse than that, you didn't make even one more dime than you had made before you got the rankings?

How can that be?

Welcome to the real world of SEO. It's time you learn that ranking reports are not your friend. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that they are closer to being meaningless drivel to everyone other than your boss's over-inflated ego... more